An Outline of a Theory of Internet Civilization

2019/04/09

I am Murai from the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, as introduced. It is a great honor to have the opportunity to speak at the historic Mita Public Speaking Event. In this solemn atmosphere, today's theme is "Internet Civilization," but I am speaking while reflecting slightly on the fact that I added "An Outline of a Theory of" to the end of the title (laughs).

I was born in 1955 at Keio Hospital in Shinanomachi. My father was also a professor of educational philosophy in the Faculty of Letters, so Keio University has been very good to me since the start of my life. I then went on to the Faculty of Engineering (now the Faculty of Science and Technology), where I researched software called operating systems. That led me to work on computer networks and the research of the Internet, which I will talk about now.

The Heisei Era Was the Age of the Internet

As you know, 2019 is the final year of the Heisei era. Many media outlets are reportedly planning projects to summarize Heisei, and "Internet" is often cited as one of the keywords for summarizing the 30 years of Heisei, so I receive calls from all over. Looking back at the Heisei era, many people likely consider the spread of the Internet to be one of the most significant social events.

In fact, the Internet penetration rate in Japan has reached nearly 90%, and our lives can no longer be separated from the Internet. Given this situation, I have recently started using the term "Internet Civilization."

Keio University established the Cyber Civilization Research Center (CCRC) in 2018 as a sub-organization of the Keio University Global Research Institute (KGRI), and we invited Professor David Farber to serve as co-director with me. Professor Farber is 84 years old and is a global authority in the field of IT (Information Technology), with many of his students active as leaders in the fields of computer science and computer networks. Recently, we held a symposium at Mita to discuss the perspective of viewing Internet technology as a "civilization"—that is, how we should understand the characteristics and changes in our society and lives built by the Internet. I believe we are currently in a very important period where society is about to be transformed even more significantly by the Internet.

Today, I would like to talk with you about why the Internet was created and what we can see when we look at the Internet from the perspective of "civilization," and I hope to receive your wisdom.

Life Surrounded by Digital Technology

First, what is civilization?

First, civilization has a foundational science. Civilization arises based on the accumulation of knowledge such as mathematics and astronomy, from which humans create tools, invent technologies, and create various things. For example, there are things that symbolize that civilization, such as the Sphinx or Greek architecture. Society is formed within these things created by humans, and sometimes two civilizations conflict, or there is a legacy, and these become the foundation for culture and society. I believe this is what civilization is.

Second, civilization has a geographical point and range. Places like the Middle East, Africa, or Asia. And when two or more civilizations exist simultaneously, conflict, friction, or fusion occurs. I believe civilization can be characterized in that way.

Thinking about it, today, digital technology is all around us, and a society has been born where more than 90% of us can use digital data (numerical data). Not only PCs, but also the smartphones and TVs you have, and even electric rice cookers are wonderful computers. They achieve the traditional cooking method of "low heat at first, then high heat" through computer control. In that sense, you could almost say a rice cooker is a robot. It can be said that the modern era is a time when life conducted using digital technology has reached almost the entire society.

We live our lives surrounded by digital technology, create society, and within that, conflicts sometimes occur, or the misuse and abuse of technology such as crime also arises. In fact, the tools and technologies that humanity has created so far have followed the same path. And when we capture the characteristics of the life and social environment brought about by digital technology and computers, we can consider that a situation worthy of being called "Internet Civilization" is emerging right now.

All Information is "Calculated"

By the way, what kind of mechanism is the Internet? For me, having been involved in the development of the Internet, it wasn't that a mechanism was completed from the start, but rather it was built through gradual improvements, thinking "let's make something better tomorrow than today" and "I'll solve tomorrow's problems the day after tomorrow." However, looking back, I gradually come to understand what this essentially was and what principles it should be designed with.

Among them, I believe the most important is the concept of "digital." For example, let's consider a camera. What used to be printed on film is now used by professionals with digital cameras. Video has also changed from 8mm film to digital. Also, before that, we encountered the digitization of music, where LPs were replaced by CDs.

However, wasn't the word processor something we benefited from even earlier? It was just around the time I was writing my doctoral thesis. A word processor is a tool that turns characters into numbers and uses the power of a computer to create a clean copy of those numbered characters. My handwriting is very messy, so I longed for beautiful characters and have loved typewriters since elementary school, but unfortunately, they couldn't type Japanese. When word processors went on sale, I remember going to great lengths to buy one because even I could print beautiful kanji. At that time, many people even in the Faculty of Engineering still wrote papers by hand.

In other words, representing characters with numbers (digits). Representing images with numbers. Representing temperature and emotions all with numbers. In other words, it becomes digital technology in the sense of converting into data using numbers. Since digital technology is all numbers, smells, tastes, images, and characters can all be grouped and lined up together (though tastes and smells are still difficult).

On the other hand, looking at the field of life sciences, as we elucidate what kind of signals our nerves are sending and what kind of structure DNA is made of, we have found that everything can indeed be expressed in numbers. Then, since that data can also be converted into digital data, various processing can be done by computing. This is where the computer appears. Originally, a computer was literally something that did "calculation," but when all data came to be expressed in numbers, the role of the computer changed completely.

When I was a student in the Faculty of Engineering, a computer was a machine that quickly calculated difficult operations. Today, however, all the information around us is quantified, and a computer is a tool for processing it. This change was probably the biggest transformation leading to the current Internet Civilization. It is truly fitting to call it a "paradigm shift."

Why is this a major transformation? An important advantage of digital data is that it is "all together," meaning that information with originally different properties can be shared and calculated, which means that images, music, and text can be handled simultaneously on a single computer. This is expressed as "computers having versatility." This versatility creates a common foundation that leads to civilization.

All Information is "Connected"

And the digitization of information brings another important concept: "network." Instead of everyone gathering at one computer, many computers around us connect to each other to create our life and social environment. This is the concept of a computer network.

Computer network technology is, simply put, technology for transmitting numerical data between computers. For example, with a postcard, we write characters on paper, drop it in a mailbox, it is physically delivered as mail, and the message arrives when the recipient reads the postcard. Reproducing this in the digital world, character information is first converted into numbers, the numbers are processed by a computer, passed to the next computer, then the next, and eventually reach the recipient.

The design philosophy of the Internet was how to make this mechanism as simple as possible. Once that is achieved, we can freely exchange digital information. This is the foundational technology of the Internet in the sense of "exchanging digital information."

Is it Okay if it Connects Sometime, Somewhere?

By the way, there are two things that make me think "I'm glad we used numbers." For example, suppose you send a New Year's card from the post office. People who write with brushes, people who carve woodblocks, people who make full use of PCs—everyone writes with great effort. Then, a postal worker delivers it on New Year's Day, but it would be a disaster if it didn't arrive. If they said, "I lost it on the way" or "I dropped it somewhere," it would be irrecoverable. Therefore, the delivery of mail requires a reliable and safe mechanism.

However, digital information is not like that. After all, the content of a beautiful New Year's card is ultimately just a string of numbers. If you send this over the Internet and it doesn't arrive, you can just send it again. The original data still exists. Just keep resending it, and it will arrive eventually. Moreover, the information arrives without any degradation. It won't get worse by being rewritten, and the picture won't fade by being reprinted. As long as digital information is a sequence of numbers, it can be "resent" any number of times without degradation.

In fact, this has a very important meaning in the design of the Internet system. Let's think about the postcard example again. In the case of a postcard, correct communication is impossible unless the accuracy of the transport system from the point of mailing to the point of receipt is extremely high. Building such a system is very expensive. Mail is a very expensive infrastructure, and it took many years to build the system.

On the other hand, in the case of the Internet, is it like searching for a path to the recipient while saying, "Let's try to make it arrive somehow for now"? I often compare this to a railway. For example, to come to Mita Campus from Seijogakuen-mae Station on the Odakyu Line, I used to come to Shibuya Station via Shimokitazawa and take a bus. Recently, both Shimokitazawa Station and Shibuya Station have undergone major structural changes, and I absolutely don't want to transfer there (laughs). So there are various paths, like "Let's go to Shinjuku and then to Tamachi." From Hiyoshi, too, people might think, "The Toyoko Line to Shibuya is crowded, so let's use the Mita Line," or if a certain line stops, we transfer between stations while making decisions about other routes.

Railways like the Odakyu Line, Inokashira Line, and JR are operated by different companies. Completely independent networks are interconnected, and we ride them, but not many people ride the train while worrying about things like "Tokyu's management lately..."; they just think, "As long as I get there." This is exactly what the Internet is.

The Internet is made by combining the sending of digital data to the next transfer station, and then the next... It is a mechanism where chunks of data called packets are propagated like a bucket brigade while considering where to transfer. Therefore, sometimes things like "it seems the data didn't arrive well" or "it got corrupted on the way" happen. But if that is known, the sender can just say "it's okay, it's okay" and resend it until it arrives via the correct path.

The principle is simple, but as a social system, it is built completely differently from the mail. We get angry if we send a postcard and it doesn't arrive. However, for digital data, we can tell the relay points, "That's the principle, so don't worry." In the railway analogy, even if there are problems here and there, such as crowded lines, accident-prone lines, or lines with few trains or cars, if they are connected, they take on part of some path and eventually arrive. Even without a mechanism where everything is accurate, safe, and robust like the mail, it functions as a whole system. That is why the Internet covered the whole world in just 30 years.

Autonomous Decentralized Thought and Keio University

Now, Keio University played a very large role in the process of the Internet spreading in Japan. At that time, we were doing network research by hand. We were always being scolded in the Faculty of Engineering. "Are you guys going to do research on things that phone companies do?" (laughs). However, something made by hand by researchers carrying the national infrastructure also symbolizes the design philosophy of the Internet. In other words, one of the design ideas is that there is no need to spend enormous costs on infrastructure; each part plays its role in an autonomous decentralized manner, and by connecting them, infrastructure is created. The fundamental difference in system design philosophy arises here between the idea of moving a social system centrally and the idea of moving it in an autonomous decentralized manner.

This is also one of the reasons why I want to use the word "civilization." What can humanity create through the collection of individual participation and division of roles, and how can we join forces? I think the fact that it connects to this kind of thinking has a very important meaning as the relationship between the design philosophy of the Internet and civilization.

Later, I moved from Keio to Tokyo Tech. However, since my students were still at Keio, I had to go get Keio's data, but it took a lot of time to travel back and forth between the laboratory in Ookayama and the one in Yagami. JUNET (Japan University Network, or Japan Unix Network) was created by connecting two computers to save that trouble. This is the history of the birth of the Internet for me.

The Person Who Named "RFC"

Let's talk a bit further back into the history of the Internet. Its starting point was 1969, and it has two roots. Since this isn't written much outside of my books, I think you shouldn't trust other books (laughs). Some terrible articles and textbooks say things like "the Internet is a military network born from the military industry," but this is a lie.

The first root is a computer network called ARPANET. ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) is an American organization that provides research funding for advanced and challenging cutting-edge technology, and its name is now DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).

You might think, "Since DARPA is an agency of the Department of Defense, isn't it military after all?" but in the United States, many cutting-edge technology studies not directly linked to the military industry have been born from DARPA. Research on packet-switching networks began with funding from DARPA, and ARPANET was born from that. However, this was not a technology created for defense-related purposes. I know the development members well, including Vinton Cerf, who was one of the leaders, and they rather made efforts to spread the research results of the Internet in a way that did not involve the Department of Defense.

Let me introduce an episode that supports this. Internet technical standards are decided in the form of "RFC number so-and-so." Numbers are given to each technical standard, such as RFC 799 or RFC 822. And "RFC" stands for "Request for Comments." Isn't it strange? The document name for technical standardization is "requesting comments."

The person who named this was Jon Postel. When he was working at UCLA, he was in charge of compiling research result documents. When releasing these research results, he thought, "I want to make it completely open. Let's make it so that anyone in the world, even if they aren't rich, can read all the content." He also created rules for how to write the text and made it so that anyone could print it. That is the rule for standardization documents, where everyone can participate. However, the source of research funding is a national agency. Research results must also be submitted to the state. So, he thought of a certain expedient.

Namely, if there were a flaw in the submitted research results, he might face criticism when it was made public. To avoid such a situation, he would first release the research results widely to receive evaluation. As a result, if they were recognized as excellent results, he would submit them. That's why he named it RFC (Everyone, please give me comments). In this way, DARPA certainly received these research results, but since they were released before submission, they were exposed to the eyes of people all over the world and became a common property of humanity that anyone could access. That is ARPANET.

The Philosophy of UNIX

Actually, from here on is the origin of the Internet that isn't written much in books, but there is another fact that I, and Keio University, have been greatly influenced by. That is the operating system (OS) called UNIX. I have been involved in this research since the roots of UNIX.

An OS is basic software for running a computer. Conventionally, there were first general-purpose large computers called mainframes, and OSs were developed so that everyone could use them and their functions could be maximized. However, some people appeared who thought, "Can't we make an OS for humans?"—that is, to develop it from the human side.

In the United States, there is a laboratory famous for basic research called Bell Labs. It is also known for producing many Nobel Prize winners. At Bell Labs, two researchers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, developed a simpler OS from a large and complex OS called Multics. "Uni (single)" as opposed to "multi (many)," hence UNIX. This was in 1969. Concepts you often use, such as "folder," "directory," and "file," were born from UNIX. Not a computer provided by a computer company, but an easy-to-use computer thought out from the logic of the user—that is, a computer that develops based on human demands—was born with this UNIX.

Why is this important? To digress a bit, when I was a student, I hated computers. After all, they were expensive and acted superior (laughs). Keio University also bought a very expensive computer, and we all lined up and waited our turn, and when we entered data, the calculation results would come out the next day. Looking at this, I would imagine that there was some kind of monster called a computer, and humans were swarming around it. Humans are supposed to be superior, so why is the computer acting so bossy? That's why I hated computers.

Therefore, even when I entered the Faculty of Engineering, I didn't think I would do computer research. I liked mathematics and physics, but it was only after I went to Yagami and met Professor Masakazu Nakanishi that I started working on computers. At that time, I learned the concept of UNIX, and from there I entered this world.

Network + Operating System

Now, at Bell Labs at that time, they were researching software called "Writer's Workbench." This was a tool for writing good sentences on a computer, and it became possible for anyone to create things like changing sentences where the same ending is repeated because they are hard to read, or adding line breaks if a paragraph is long, or extracting only the endings and representing everything else with periods. Then, people could use computers as tools exactly as they wished, such as how to use a computer to write good sentences or how to use a computer when searching for something in text. This is the flow that was born from UNIX.

This flow of UNIX and the flow of packet communication called ARPANET were independent in the 1970s. Around this time, having progressed from undergraduate to a master's course, I was researching networks under Professor Hideo Aiso and Professor Mario Tokoro, while studying OS under Professor Nobuo Saito, and I wanted to join these two—that is, I wanted to connect computers. This was, so to speak, the marriage of computers and communication technology for us. This happened at Yagami Campus in the early 80s.

However, there was someone who thought of something similar at the same time. A person named Bill Joy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was in the same grade as me and a friend since our master's days, and we both entered from OS research. I discussed this research I was doing at Yagami with Bill at Berkeley.

Berkeley had been modifying the OS since the late 70s and distributing it to universities around the world as BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution). They are very good at spreading research results to the world. This also isn't written much in history books, but actually Keio created this UNIX network within the university first. At that time, Bill told me, "Eventually, I'll overtake Jun's research and incorporate it into the OS we're distributing at Berkeley," and he submitted that research plan to DARPA.

Then, a huge amount of research funding was provided. They incorporated the TCP/IP network protocol into the version they were distributing, 4.1BSD. We were making it independently, but it wasn't shared globally. Then in 1982, 4.2BSD was distributed, and through it, computers at universities and research institutions around the world were connected as one.

There aren't many books that write this as the "birth of the Internet," but this is the truth. If you only look at the flow from ARPANET, you might misunderstand that it was born from military technology, but it was actually BSD—that is, the software distributed by the research team at the University of California, Berkeley—that connected the world. This is also the origin of open source, and the important thing is that the first things to be connected were universities.

A Global Sharing Foundation for Knowledge and Information

"Universities around the world connected by an information network." This brought about a major change to universities. The primary job of a university is research. Researchers write papers and submit them to academic journals operated by academic societies. Then, for example, a reviewer might make requests called "conditional acceptance," so the researcher rewrites and sends it again. By repeating this and having several papers published, one can eventually obtain a doctoral degree. However, in our field, it takes a good six months from the time a paper is accepted until it is published as a journal. Then, since several papers must be written, it takes at least three to five years to obtain a doctoral degree.

In addition, there are international conferences as a place for academia to share knowledge. Keio also hosts many international conferences, where researchers from all over the world get on planes, stay in hotels, and participate in the conference. It is very expensive. However, if universities are connected by the Internet, this cost drops significantly.

Nowadays, papers can be shared and meetings can be held on the Internet. International conferences and journals are increasingly moving online. The latest research results can be shared instantly around the world at no cost. Universities were the ones that received the greatest benefit from the Internet, but this is natural considering the characteristics of the Internet. This is because the Internet is a sharing foundation for human knowledge and information. I think the history of this "global sharing foundation for knowledge and information" being born from universities, utilized by universities, and provided to the world is very important when considering the role of the Internet.

To Industrial and Lifestyle Technology

And these benefits of the Internet quickly spread to the industrial and lifestyle sectors.

For example, in 1990, a person named Tim Berners-Lee invented the WWW (World Wide Web). This is a platform for linking documents scattered on the Internet so they can be cross-referenced. Mr. Berners-Lee was developing an information-sharing system between researchers at a laboratory called CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Switzerland, which later developed into the "Web," leading to the birth of search engines like Google today.

Also, the WWW has a major impact on the progress of AI. The WWW makes it possible to access any number of the vast amount of papers on the Internet. Software can collect and analyze papers on a certain matter like a robot. By using this, vast amounts of information can be analyzed to generate a lot of intelligence and information. This greatly boosted the development of AI.

What are called big data and deep learning also have the development of the Internet and the progress of search functions at their foundation. Today, research is also emerging that analyzes information on Twitter to make market predictions.

As a unique example, there is also research on hay fever tweets by high school students. Using data we prepared, they collected and analyzed keywords such as "hay fever," "runny nose," and "tears" on Twitter. The Japan Meteorological Agency issues forecasts for pollen location information, and those forecasts matched perfectly with the frequency of keyword use and their movement on Twitter. Not only that, the high school student discovered that there is a difference in reaction between men and women. This insight may eventually lead to medical research results.

On the Internet, vast amounts of data can be collected and processed at an overwhelmingly low cost. This has a major impact and benefit not only on academia but also on every field of society.

Incidentally, SFC was also established at Keio University in exactly 1990. It can be seen that the foundational technology of the Internet had largely reached completion by around 1990 and then spread to society while progressing rapidly.

Is Japan Continuing to Lose in Internet Development?

I am sometimes scolded with comments like "The Internet is dominated by platformers like GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), and Japan is on a losing streak." I don't argue every time, but this is also not true. A lot of Japanese wisdom is utilized in GAFA as well.

So, I would like to introduce a bit about Japan's contribution to the development of the Internet. In the 90s, Japan made a very large contribution.

For example, when viewing a document in a browser, Chinese documents can be seen in Chinese, English in English, and French in French. In fact, this multilingual environment on the Internet is something Japan has led the way in creating.

That is because until around 2000, the countries with the most Internet users were the US and Japan, but the computer science experts in the US were all people who didn't even notice that people who don't speak English live on this planet (laughs).

To be sure, instructions like "go to" or "if" when calculating could be in the alphabet, and researchers only needed to be able to read English at the level of a paper, so they didn't need to worry much. However, when computers came to be used as tools to support human life and wisdom, language became an important issue.

Turning English into Japanese is a huge task. I once discussed a programming language called "C language" with the aforementioned Dennis Ritchie. In C language, there is a variable called "char type" for handling characters, which is 8 bits, meaning it can have 256 expressions. I said to Dennis, "Dennis, what does char mean?" "Don't you even know that? It's obviously character." "I know that. Why do you think there are only 256 characters?" Then he said, "Isn't 256 enough?" However, in Japanese, at least 6,000 characters are needed including kanji and kana, so they won't fit in 8 bits.

Saying "Then let's think about how to rebuild it," the field of researching internationalization technology for software was born. This is called "INTERNATIONALIZATION," but since it's long at 20 characters, it's written as "I18N" and read as "internationalization." This research was born from how to express Japanese inside a computer.

Initially, every time software was made, it had to be Japanized, so it was very costly. Therefore, we had to go to the stage of creating international standards and say, "There are people in the world who are troubled by this, so fix the source of the standard." I was, so to speak, the leader of that charge (laughs), persuading China, Korea, and Arab countries, saying "It's not just Japan being selfish, look at the world," and working to change international standards. Therefore, Japan's achievements are great.

However, when it comes to the stage of distributing the completed software, asking Bill to send it from Berkeley or distributing it through MIT's X Window project is the easiest way to contribute to the world. That way, Japanese can be read on the Internet anywhere in the world. Any language appears on the screen. I was overjoyed.

Then, at one point, I was called by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry and scolded, "What are you doing?" They asked why I was letting MIT and Berkeley distribute it when Japan had contributed this much. To be sure, we hadn't appealed "Japan's achievements." We didn't think it was necessary.

Some of you might say, "If you're going to do it, spread the name of Keio University." Of course, I think so too, so whenever I speak anywhere, I speak with my Keio University title. However, I haven't thought much about competing nationalistically over the past 40 years.

Keio University's Contribution

Since I have the chance, let me also talk about Keio University's contribution to this Internet Civilization.

Recently, I teamed up with the publishing industry to put vertical writing and rubi into the HTML file web standard, which was completed in 2017. This was tough. Vertical writing was more difficult than the multilingual support mentioned earlier.

This is because China abolished vertical writing from official documents and school textbooks. Currently, besides Japan, only parts of Hong Kong and Taiwan use vertical writing in newspapers. Therefore, it was a lonely battle. I tell the engineers making GAFA browsers, "Put in vertical writing." "What's that?" "Look, in Japanese, a menu is beautiful when it's vertical, isn't it?" "We don't use things like that." "Wait a minute," and from there the battle begins. Since we cannot abandon the culture of vertical writing, if this is not in the standardization, everything has to be rebuilt every time. It costs a lot. Fighting in standardization is so important, and here too, Keio University operates the web standardization organization W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) and makes a large contribution.

Furthermore, the software used in Apple's network has the original development code "KAME." This is because there is an intersection called "Karigome" right next to SFC, and the result of using the Ka and Me from "Karigome" as the development code KAME became a world standard, and Apple adopted it. Keio is also inside GAFA. Within the Internet development community, I think Keio is a university that is very well recognized and respected. Because of such relationships, Keio University has awarded honorary doctorates to the aforementioned Vinton Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee.

We at Keio University have played a large role in the formation of today's Internet Civilization. In particular, SFC has also worked to lead this Internet Civilization, so not only Keio but also the name of SFC is known internationally, which sometimes makes me proud.

The Civilized World Depicted by Yukichi Fukuzawa

Despite being such a person, I was once stunned and crushed upon seeing a single picture. The figure is the frontispiece of Yukichi Fukuzawa's "Things Western (Seiyō Jijō)."

Here, first, there is a diagram showing that all humanity are brothers and family (right figure). Next to it are depicted four sciences, societies, and technologies created by human civilization (left figure). Steam engines, "Saito" (mechanisms for organizing society such as laws and economic systems), electricity, and telegraphy. It seems Yukichi Fukuzawa saw an experiment in Washington sending signals between two utility poles.

What struck me was the round picture in the center of the left figure. Utility poles stand all over the earth, wires connect them, and an express messenger (hikyaku) runs on top of them. This is exactly the concept of the Internet itself. The earth is connected as one, and the express messenger carrying messages is the packet of the Internet protocol. We have built the foundation of this Internet Civilization from the academic network without being conscious of the concept of national borders. It is a world where people all over the world can connect instantly and cheaply through digital technology. When I think that Yukichi Fukuzawa brilliantly visualized that concept 150 years ago, I am truly amazed.

Two Coexisting Worlds

In any case, it has become natural for us to create an environment where the world is connected as one and for humanity to live on it. This is why it is called a "civilization."

Here, we are considering an Earth where two worlds coexist. One is the real society, and the other is the cyberspace on the Internet.

First, in the real world, laws and systems differ by country. Divided by the framework of national borders, we create society within them. In other words, it is an "international" society, and territorial issues between Russia and Japan, or trade issues between the US and China, are negotiated and adjusted between nations.

What about currency? In the real world, each country has a central bank and issues currency for that country. On the other hand, virtual currencies like Bitcoin that circulate in the Internet space have appeared and are spreading throughout the world without being supported or blocked by the state.

We university people are increasingly active in cyberspace. Without being blocked by national borders, we share knowledge and discuss with researchers all over the world on the Internet. Remote education is also becoming widespread.

In the future, we will spend more of our lives in this global Internet space. Also, we will process more of the problems occurring in real society in this global Internet space. For example, climate change such as global warming is a phenomenon occurring in the real international society, but to solve this problem, we will have to investigate and discuss it in the Internet space that envelops the entire earth. Also, for problems related to people's lives and health such as famine and disease, it will be important to develop medical research globally while utilizing the benefits of Internet Civilization on the one hand, and to seek international cooperation on the other.

Recently, among the research I have started is the development of insurance products related to childhood cancer. Since the treatment of childhood cancer costs a high amount of 50 million to 100 million yen, not everyone can receive sufficient treatment. However, if they survive, they can live to be a hundred, for example, and earn income by working during that time. Can we create a new insurance system from that? While utilizing new technologies like blockchain and new financial systems in the Internet space, I am working on problem-solving with a global approach different from the conventional one, in cooperation with financial and insurance experts and medical experts.

Jumping Over Boundaries

Keio University is a comprehensive university, so wisdom from diverse fields is gathered. If this were siloed, we could not create the future of Internet Civilization. Conversely, in the age of Internet Civilization, we can exert great power by linking diverse wisdom.

SFC, established in 1990, aimed to be an interdisciplinary campus. I have worked at SFC since its opening and have simultaneously advanced the development of the Internet, and by people from various fields joining forces, problems that couldn't be solved before have been solved. We have been able to reach goals that couldn't be reached before. We have been able to realize dreams that couldn't come true before.

Isn't this the essential characteristic and true role of Internet Civilization? Without allocating large costs, everyone can participate and build the future with the power of each individual. It is the participation of each of us, and also the power of society, that will create this civilization.

Many challenges will emerge from now on. Keio University must, of course, be at the center and lead the way. I strongly expect that each of you will participate, join forces, and a new Internet Civilization will be born.

That is all from me. Thank you very much for today.

(This article is based on a lecture at the 707th Mita Public Speaking Event held on December 13, 2018, with some additions and corrections.)